


the grave robbers

by arbitrarily



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, F/M, Mutual Masturbation, Post-Season/Series 01, Pseudo-Sex Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-02 23:54:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11520192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: She's not dead. She's just not alive yet either.





	the grave robbers

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty much just porn with some slight divergence from canon events at the end of S1 to set up said porn lol.

 

I’m gonna feel this way until you kill it.  
ELVIS COSTELLO

 

 

There are always loopholes, even with god-ordained death sentences. That’s one moral of this story. 

“What I can offer you, doll, is a band-aid,” Ostara says. “A stop-gap measure. Something to keep you from sliding off the bone, yeah?” Laura doesn’t say anything; Ostara braces her hands on her hips. “I can at least get rid of the rot. That’s not nothing.” 

“Please, I beg,” Sweeney says. He swats at an errant fly buzzing past his head. 

“You won’t be dead and you won’t be alive. You’ll be,” Ostara pauses, then holds her arms open wide — a showcase, “a ghost made corporeal.”

So she can help her. At least, a little.

 

 

 

 

“Now, to begin. I need you to tell me what were some of the things, when you were,” Ostara waves her hand, a gesture Laura thinks means _not dead_ , “that made you stop and think, ‘it is truly a blessing to be alive.’”

“I … ” Laura pauses. “I was never that person? You know. Never skipping around with the birds and saying, ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning.’ That’s not me. That wasn’t me.”

“Shocker,” Sweeney says. He’s slumped against the wall, his over-tall frame still dominating the space the three of them share in the bathroom.  She doesn’t know why he’s even here.  She ignores him.

“Fine. Fine, fine, fine. Then, when you were alive, what did you _like_?”

Laura screws up her face. “Shadow,” she says, definitively, as if the list starts and ends there.

“Yup, we got that one down on the list. Next,” Sweeney says. She glares at him.

“I don’t know.” She purses her lips together. “I used to like to watch, at the casino, where I worked, that second right before a person realized that they’d lost. It was like watching a key turn in a door they wished they hadn’t opened, that moment of revelation that they were totally fucked.”

“That’s fucked up,” Sweeney says, not far enough under his breath.

“Okay, fine. I liked vodka and I liked whiskey. I didn’t even like the top shelf shit — I liked the cheap stuff, the stuff that burned on its way down. I liked it when I felt like it could make me choke. I liked when my bedsheets were tucked in so tight I could barely crawl in under the covers and I slept like I was trapped. I liked the smell of bug spray. I liked the burn of that, too. I liked when I stayed in the tub too long and my skin went all wrinkly and gross, and okay, I get the fucking irony of that now — no need to remind me. I liked when glue dried on my fingers and I’d peel it off. I liked angel food cake. I liked when I’d lay in bed at night sometimes and be just about to fall asleep, but then, I’d jolt awake, like I was falling down a flight of stairs or something in my almost dreams. Or whatever. You know — everyone knows that feeling.”

“I don’t know that feeling,” Ostara says.

“I liked sex.”

“Oh, we can work with that.” Ostara grabs Laura’s arm. “Girl talk: tell me. What’d you like about sex?”

What had Laura liked: that moment when he first pushes in with his cock and you can feel the stretch and it hurts. It feels good, but it hurts, and she’s always craving that hurt. That burn. Her mother never taught her not to touch the stove top, never taught her to fear heat or flame. Never told her it was wrong, so she wants it, she craves it. How it spikes the pleasure that much higher, makes anything good that much more worth wanting. What had she liked: when he gets you really wet but you’re still both fully dressed and there won’t be any fucking for a good long while and you’re wet and you suffer and you want (it’s always about the wanting; sometimes even better than the getting) and when he finally takes your clothes off, your panties are soaking wet.

“You need more?” Laura asks.

“I think you bent the leprechaun’s rainbow,” Ostara says, a faux whisper. “But that’s enough,” she says, “at least for me to try.”

 

 

 

 

“Am I supposed to feel … different?” Laura asks. She doesn’t. Not really. Ostara brought her part way back to life — her words, not Laura’s. The scars and the stitches are still there. Still holding her together. She’s still empty. Still dead.

“Give it time,” Ostara snaps. “Nothing through the grace of God or gods is a quick fix.”

“You mind if I take a shower?” Laura glances around at the floral print wallpaper, the matching shower curtain. “Does this bathroom actually work, or is it just decorative?”

“I swear, human girls. You might not stink any longer, but you’re sure making for one heck of a house guest.” Ostara snaps her fingers. “Keep it snappy. Your fellow and his boss have already gone.”

“Find me clothes!” she shouts at Sweeney before shutting the bathroom door. 

She examines herself in the shower. The decay has stalled, and soon, if Ostara proves right, it will reverse, but she traces a fingers down the stitching of her body. It almost tickles. She can almost feel it.

She doesn’t breathe. She doesn’t have a heartbeat. Still, that’s what everything is. She’s empty, still. And Sweeney wants the coin, _still_ ,  lodged in her ribs, _still_. She can feel it sometimes. It doesn’t hurt; it’s just there. That was life before too, wasn’t it? It doesn’t hurt. She’s just there. She wonders how he’ll get it out of her. If he’ll shake her like a piggy bank until she squeals and everything including his coin tumbles out of her. If he’ll reach inside of her, cut a hole in her chest and stick his entire hand in and root around until he lands on metal. Until he finds what shouldn’t be inside of her. What else is in there that shouldn’t be? There was Robbie’s cock. That had been inside of her when it shouldn’t have. There were her mother’s menthol cigarettes she stole at the age of fourteen and smoked, the illicit act of it more satisfying than the mint-flavored smoke that nauseated her. The cheap bourbon she’d swig at work, if only to give herself something wrong to do. But that’s never been the problem — Laura storing things inside of herself that shouldn’t be there. No, her problem has always been its direct opposite: she has nothing. She’s empty. The only thing in her now is a heart that does not beat and organs that do not work and a coin that is not hers. 

The soap in the bathroom smells strongly of magnolia, the scent overpowering. But even beneath that, and even after the marathon shower Laura takes, she can smell that underlying formaldehyde-y decaying stench. She rummages through the cabinets — plush pale purple towel after plush pale purple towel, more bowls of potpourri than a spinster aunt would find necessary. The only thing she finds is an old bottle of aftershave, half empty. Whatever. She liberally spritzes it over herself. 

She gathers up the clothes Sweeney left on the toilet for her. “What the fuck,” she mutters. She’s not sure where he found them or what the joke is but they're men’s sweatpants she has to roll three times at the waist to almost fit her and a child’s Six Flags Fiesta Texas t-shirt barely long enough to cover her scarred midriff.

“Ready?” she asks Sweeney. He wrinkles his nose up.

“Are you wearing cologne?”

“No. Let’s go.”

“You smell like a fucking barbershop quartet.”

 

 

 

 

“Mr. Sandman” is playing on the radio inside the ice cream truck. They’re on the road again. 

Per Ostara’s instructions (or was it just a recommendation?), if Laura wants to truly live then she has to convince Wednesday to take back what’s been done — a taller order than she thinks anyone is telling her, but she’s always been the sort to need to learn things on her own. Then, Sweeney gets his coin back once she has rejoined the land of the living.

They had just missed them. 

They share a wary silence at first, Sweeney watching her sidelong as she drives. Like she’s a science experiment. The ant under the magnifying glass. Waiting for her to ignite or some shit.

“You feel any different?” he finally asks her. She glares at the road, refuses to look at him. 

“No, and stop fucking asking.”

It’s not entirely the truth. But she’s not sure how to put it into words what she’s feeling and not feeling. It’s the both simultaneously that has her tripped up, like when you go to the dentist to get a cavity filled and they novocaine your mouth up and when it starts to wear off, how you can feel it but you can’t. How you’re drooling down your chin and you feel something there but you can’t connect the dots that it’s yourself you’re feeling. That’s where she’s at right now: a numbed mouth trying to learn to bite and taste again. 

Sweeney fills the quiet after the only thing the truck’s radio can scan is static. He doesn’t talk about history that much, his, Ireland’s, America’s, whatever. Instead, each topic out of his mouth is some personal inanity. For example, Sweeney talks about Big Cereal the same way Karl who manned the roulette wheel at the casino talked about the military-industrial complex. 

About two hours into the drive, Laura starts coughing. And then she keeps coughing, like her body is trying to relearn something as fundamental and unthinking as breathing. She feels clammy, her throat tickling, occasional pins and needles sparking up and down her arms and legs, subsiding as unexpectedly as they arrive. Her entire body is like one giant hiccup: annoying and off-kilter.

“Ugh,” she finally says when they stop for gas. “I feel like a fucking chicken cutlet left out to thaw at room temperature.”

“Look like it, too.”

“The fuck does that mean?” Sweeney doesn’t answer, swings out of the truck instead and heads to the pump. She glances down at herself. Her arms are still that unnatural pale, but not as gray as she had looked when they had pulled up at Chateau Ostara. She pulls down her aviator shades and looks into the rear view mirror. Her eyes have returned to their original color, no longer milky like a granny’s cataracts. There’s still something sepulchral and off about her face, but it’s not entirely ghoulish. Though, she might be biased.

“You think Shadow’s still gonna wanna fuck me?” she asks her reflection. She needs to find some chapstick. She also needs to invest in some crewnecks, hide the stitches and the scars. 

“Still?” Sweeney leans against the side of the truck against her open window. “Darling, look at it this way: your outsides match your insides now.”

“No thanks to you.” She flips him off. Flips her shades back down. 

“With pleasure.”

“I have a reason for living now,” she says to herself, waiting for Sweeney to rejoin her. Scanning the distance for any sign of Shadow. “I’m just lacking in the mechanics.”

 

 

 

 

They stop at a motel for the night. Sweeney insisted: “I know you’ve surpassed the need for sleep, but as for me? Like fucking hell I’m staying in this meat locker overnight.”

“It’s an ice cream truck,” she said, deliberately obtuse. Sweeney lifted his eyebrows, incredulous and dangerous all at once. She liked when things were contradictory. That didn’t mean she liked him. 

“Fucking meat locker,” he said, so she pulled into the Sleepy Grove Motor Lodge with a sigh belonging to the long-suffering and long-dead. 

He was right: Laura doesn’t sleep. Or, she didn’t sleep, since she came back. Now though — after her second shower of the day, the bathroom here far less opulent, the soap scentless — she almost feels sleepy, or like she could convince herself she’s sleepy. Maybe it’ll be a Sleeping Beauty situation: she’ll fall asleep and wake a living, breathing person again. She remembers Ostara though. She remembers the phrase _stop-gap measure_ and when you’re desperate enough you’ll settle for any piece of the pie you can get, begrudge the results after. 

She’s begrudging now. Not even death could teach her patience. 

There’s only one bed. “Hourly or for the night?” the clerk at the front office had asked. 

“The night,” she had said, all teeth, while Sweeney snorted behind her. “And two beds.”

“Gonna be two rooms then,” the clerk said, and when she turned to Sweeney, all he did was shrug.

“Not a fucking ATM, y’know.”

So it’s one room and one bed, the carpet nubby and over-trafficked under her bare feet. She can feel that. She can also feel the sheets against her skin, heavily washed and stiff, itchy even. Or maybe anything and everything would feel itchy against her skin right now. Egyptian cotton, those crazy thread count sheets Audrey bought on sale that one time and Robbie still fought her about it. She wonders if Audrey is gonna miss that, fighting with Robbie about the dumbest shit. Of course Audrey misses that; conflict had always been her way of demonstrating affection. 

She kicks her legs out, restless, uncomfortable, clips Sweeney’s leg with her heel. 

“Let it be said, lest anyone go getting ideas, I hardly relish the sleeping arrangements either. But you don’t see me kicking anyone, right?”

“I can’t sleep.” She flails her arms. Her elbows feel numb.

“I can, and I don’t care,” he says from beneath the arm he has slung over his face. Laid out on his back, he takes up more than half the bed. She doesn’t think that’s fair. 

The lights are off, but their room is situated right under the big neon sign calling out to truckers and the road-weary. It’s bright red, and even through the pulled curtains it fills the room. It’s like they’re sleeping in hell, or the inside of a toaster oven, coils heated and lit. 

She watches Sweeney. He’s dropped his arm down to his chest, both arms crossed over it as it rises and falls in time with his deepening breath. She watches that and counts — instead of sheep, she has a leprechaun — but it doesn’t do anything. Her eyelids feel itchy, gritty. She rolls to her back; her one leg trembles, like the muscles are overworked even though she’s done nothing but drive. And have Ostara try to bring her back to life. 

What did she used to do when she couldn’t sleep? She never used to mind, actually. Laying in bed, doing nothing but stare at the ceiling and wait for either sleep or morning never phased her. One or the other would happen — it was all a matter of time. Everything was a matter of time, even after you were dead. 

“I think I’d feel better if I got off,” Laura says, staring up at the ceiling.

“Got off what?” He sounds half-asleep. That’s also not fair. If she can’t sleep, he can’t sleep. 

“Myself.” She makes both syllables brutal and sharp. She watches one eye snap open, his arms still crossed over his chest. 

She’s working something out in her head. This is also what she used to do when she was alive and unable to sleep: she worked puzzles in her brain. The time stamped out on the lit-up digital clock next to the bed became a code, an algebraic equation, take the numbers given and solve for the arbitrary quantity of _x_. Her puzzles now are more cosmic, more impossible. She is trying to work out how morality works when you’re not even party to the living, breathing, human world. If she was in heaven, she could be fucking, like, Elvis Presley in his prime or Paul Newman pre-salad dressing or getting whatever celestial dick she wanted. Unless heaven doesn’t work that way. Or she didn’t wind up there. 

“Do you know what heaven’s like?”

“What?” he grunts. “No.” He sighs, swallowing audibly and shifting beside her. The quiet, intimate domesticity of it all makes her chest feel tight. Makes her feel something. She looks away from him. “You need special classification to get that kind of intel.”

“Shit. Like scientology.” The quiet is broken by the clink and clanging of the air conditioner startling to life. “Wait, does that mean Xenu’s one of your — ”

“Don’t.” He holds up a hand. “And no.”

“I can’t wait to tell fucking Audrey.” She goes quiet after she says that. She’ll probably never see Audrey ever again. And even if she did, she doubts she’d get a chance or a word in edge-wise to shift the conversation to debunking scientology. 

“Go to fucking sleep,” he says.

“I’m. Trying.”

 

 

 

 

She’s not sure how long Sweeney lets her toss and turn before he decides he’s had enough. He clamps a hand on her hip. “I said: go to fucking sleep.”

“And I said, I’m trying,” she hisses. Doesn’t he get it? She’s stuck in this weird in-between state, tired and wired awake, which shouldn’t really come as any surprise considering all of her is in some weird in-between state. Like purgatory, maybe. Or like that one Sartre play she had to read in high school, and this right here, this is actually hell. 

Laura is aware of the heat of his hand on her body, how the skin beneath his hand and beneath the layer of clothing warms to his touch. He’s a fucking incubator. 

His grip goes cruel, like he’s trying to prove a point she has no interest in hearing. He jerks her body until she’s facing him.

“You said something about getting off?” he says (so, he was listening). “Get to work. You’re a selfish girl,” he says, “Or, you were a selfish girl. Now you’re a fucking selfish corpse who won’t even do this earth and all its inhabitants a kindness and depart.”

“I’m not a corpse. Not really.”

“You’re a selfish girl,” he repeats. “I’m sure you know what to do.” There is a beat where he looks down at her, searching and judgmental in all that red light. “If you’re still,” he pauses, seeking out the word, “capable.”

She scowls. She takes it as a challenge. She’s been able to feel stirrings of other vestiges of her biological humanity — why shouldn’t this be one of them? She stares back at him, her face flat, giving him nothing but defiance and a dare.

He takes it. 

Sweeney removes his hand from her hip and instead latches it around her wrist. That same heat now stretches down her arm. He guides her hand — slowly, but his grip is tight and ungiving — down her body to between her legs, over her pants. Laura doesn’t move a muscle, her entire body still. This, she thinks, is usually the part when she’d start to breathe harder. The anticipation of it. Knowing you’re going to be touched, knowing someone is willing to fuck with you. Fuck you. That’s all it would take for her. She’s not breathing now. Sweeney curves his hand around hers, his hand that much larger than hers, and makes her cup herself, his own fingers brushing against her. A fucking tease. She still hasn’t moved. If she keeps her head like this the only part of him she sees is the broad expanse of his chest, a hint of the dip of his throat leading down to the stretched collar of his undershirt. There’s a heart beating in that chest and lungs working for breath, and she can hear all of that, his inner biological machinery hard at work. He’s breathing harder, so she doesn’t have to. It doesn’t work that way, but she likes the thought more than she should. She likes the added pressure of his hand on her hand between her legs. He moves his hand, rubbing her by proxy. 

Laura tips her head back and finally looks up at him. His eyes are dark, but she thinks that’s good. She thinks she likes that, too. “You want a show, that it?”

Sweeney pulls his hand away from hers (she’s furious at herself for how she misses that extra heat; no comfort to be found in fury though — that had never left her) but he curls his fingers under the waistband of her borrowed sweats. Another flash of heat. Without meaning to, she presses her own fingers closer, firmer, against her cunt. He peels the side of her sweats down below the jut of her hip, the bone scythe-like, skin sallow, only to pull his hand back. “Shut up,” he says. “Do yourself a favor.”

“What if I can’t get wet?” The question is sudden, innocent. Nothing she had planned to say. She can’t describe what crosses over his face when she asks that. She doesn’t want to. There’s an intimacy and a responsibility to classifying the emotions you inspire in a man, even if they’re just desire. Even if he’s not really a man and you’re no longer really alive. 

Sweeney brings his fingers up to her mouth, and her lips part, sucking in a breath she doesn’t need. He sticks his fingers in her mouth and she bites. Blames it on instinct.

“What the fuck?”

“What the fuck?” she parrots back, the words garbled, tangled up in his fingers.

He pulls his fingers out of her mouth; they’re wet. “Well, she spits,” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“You can create saliva,” he says, like this is a basic biological lesson she should already understand. “Probably tears too even, if ever in your disgrace of a life you knew how to create them.”

“Ha. Ha.”

“Reason dictates — ”

“Oh, sure, fucking reason from the fucking professor right here.”

“I’m helping — I’m trying to help you. I’m not sure how you don’t understand that.” Sweeney almost sounds earnest, which she decides is wrong. Which she decides she likes.

She aimlessly grinds herself down against the hand between her legs, unsure what exactly she expects. But she can feel it — that prickle of want. It’s almost a relief. She watches him as he watches her. His mouth has gone tight, eyes focused. A show after all. He had pulled her left hand down her body; she’s right-handed. She has to roll away from him a little, take her weight off her right arm. She then unceremoniously slips her right hand under the waistband of her sweats. She isn't quick enough to bite down on her surprised gasp when her fingers find her cunt damp. Not wet like the way she used to get, so easily, the mere suggestion of sex, the idea of getting off and getting away with something wrong, something she shouldn’t do, enough to flood her. But it’s a start. 

“Fuck,” she hears him muter. She rolls her hips, experimenting. Her knee bumps into his leg. She can feel his body heat radiating off of him. She can still feel each and every point on her body where he touched her.

She’s still not wet enough though, not to be fucked the way she wants. Rough, demanding. Selfish — he was right about that. 

Laura twists her body. She pulls her hand from between her legs and reaches, tries to stick her fingers in Sweeney’s mouth. He seems to get it, a weird look flitting over his face before it settles into something like resignation and extreme horniness. Figures. His mouth is hot and wet; hits like a punch to the gut, makes something deep inside of her drop. It must be mutual, because he moans around her fingers, the sound akin to when she had kicked his ass. 

She kicks the sweats down her legs, yanks the too-small t-shirt over her head, bare now, uncaring. Her fingers drip with his spit, and she returns them to between her legs, slicking, and then pushing in. Her whole body clenches up when she slips that first finger inside herself. It feels good. Familiar, but not, like she is relearning her body and what it’s capable of. Her heels skid on the cheap sheets. She’s caught between the indecision of wanting to get off as quickly as possible and wanting to drag this out, to make this good. She knows he’s still watching her; she can feel his eyes on her.

That was how it always used to start, wasn’t it? Feel a man’s eyes on her, that was step one. Step two was trying to figure out how to use the man attached to that gaze to do her a favor. Do something, anything, for her. It wasn’t even a conscious effort on her part, just instinct. Nothing’s changed, she thinks, except for everything.

She doesn’t think about what she's doing (which is as great a thesis statement as any about the Former Life of Laura Moon, Deceased). With her left hand, she latches onto his wrist and repeats what he did to her. She guides his hand down between his legs, the side of her own hand brushing against his hardening cock. There’s no hesitation from him: just a low groan and then he’s palming himself through his pants. Then he’s reaching and taking his cock out, in hand. She watches it start to fill in his hand. He’s big, like, impressively so, but she’s never gonna tell him that. 

He shoves his waistband below his balls, farther then, pushed down his thighs. Her hand stutters against herself, inside herself, as she watches him, the heel of her hand pressed against her clit. His hand works his cock, the wet head, the jerk of his hips towards her. She’s so wet now, unsure how much is him and how much is her; he has to be able to hear the obscene soaked sound of it as her fingers work in and out, in and out. He spits in his hand and returns it to his cock, their eyes meeting. 

Laura comes when the width of his free hand grips her thigh, that flash of heat the perfect counterpoint to her hand. She grabs the front of his shirt in a fist, tears at the collar accidentally. She’s kept that superhuman strength, at least for now. It’s made all the more powerful by how she lights up as she comes. There it is, finally: that bright and alive feeling. It’s not the same as when Shadow had kissed her — her heart remains still, unmoving and unfeeling — but she is alive in a more desperate, wilder way. 

So she moves to straddle him, first wrapping her wet hand around his wrist to still his and then moving to get on top of him.

“Fucking hell, Dead Wife.” He’s panting already.

“Not dead. Just, Timed Out.” That’s how she’s come to think of herself — like the little hourglass icon that shows up on the computer screen when the system has stalled out or is thinking too hard. Stuck in one place.

She doesn’t put his dick in her at first. Instead she just grinds her cunt down onto his cock. It twitches and he jerks under her. He has to be able to feel how wet she is; she thinks that counts as a victory.

“My coin in you not enough? You gotta take more?” he says, sour and mean, but he has his hands on her hips, her skin going hot everywhere he’s touching her, dragging her against him. And then he’s pushing inside her, the burning stretch of his cock even better than her fingers. 

She shoves the back of her hand against her mouth so he can’t hear her cry out. She can feel the heat inside her, can feel it rising up, traveling through her. She shoves his shirt up, wanting to get her hands on as much of that warmth as possible, her hips rolling against his, her hair falling in her face, pleading snarls escaping her open mouth.

When she glances down, she catches him. Gazing up at her, looking at her, the way she thinks they’re all meant to look at his lot. 

She curls her hands into his shoulders cruelly, almost as if her fingers could gouge through skin and muscle. Find bone. The thought should be more unappealing than she finds it. Maybe it’s because of the sounds he’s making — whimpers and deeper groans, as if pulled from some bottomless and ageless place inside of him. How he likes it, a fucking masochist. 

But then, so is she.

It’s like he’s splitting her in half, the violence of his hips snapping up against her own. She wonders if she could break a hip like this — she feels so insubstantial. Half-formed. His hands are wrapped around her waist, fingers all but meeting in the middle, squeezing her painfully. Like her bones are hollow and with the right snap, twist, he could break her. The bed is noisy as it jostles against the wall, a percussive beat that would match the beating of her own heart if such a feat was possible. 

Her head drops forward when she’s close to coming, her eyes fluttering shut and then open, the most alive she’s felt for the longest period of time since — since he killed her. His mouth is right there, but she doesn’t kiss him. Instead she takes each pant that escapes his mouth and tries to breathe it into herself. _You gotta take more?_ he had asked. Stupid motherfucker; of course she did. She always did. She can taste his breath in her mouth, hot, stale, his, so she sucks it in deeper, feels herself clenching around his cock, lets her body go with his as he fucks up into her harder. She can feel his hands now and they hurt, they hurt, but she can feel it, and the shaky noise that leaves her mouth almost sounds triumphant. She takes more of his breath, and she can feel that too, feel it in her chest, her lungs, she’s never been more aware of each and every part of herself, and this is it, this is what she used to love: aching burning exhausted muscle, her body taken and filled, the precipice of violence intimacy drives you straight to the edge of, a mouth with teeth so close to her own, a man who would do anything absolutely anything for you. 

Even kill you. 

 

 

 

 

“Am I sweating?” She thinks she came twice. The muscles in her thighs won’t stop jumping.

“I think it’s mine,” he gasps.

She slicks a hand down her chest, bumping over the ridges of her stitches. “Gross.”

Laura lays there, flat on her back beside Sweeney. He is trying to catch his breath; she can still feel him inside of her. She mimics him for three breaths and then gives up the farce. Alive but not alive, dead but not dead. A stop-gap measure. She sighs. It's fine. She's always been able to survive a little contradiction. 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> widespindriftgaze @ tumblr


End file.
